Reflections of Lucretius in Late Antique and Early Modern Biblical and Scientific Poetry: Providence and the Sublime

Abstract

My topic is a part of a history that goes back to Virgil, that of the reaction of writers and thinkers who adhere to providentialist and transcendental models of reality to the materialist and anti-providentialist poem of Lucretius.1 As such it might seem to have no place in a book on Lucretius and modernity, if by modernity is understood rationalism, free-thinking, libertinism, and a scientific and anti-deist understanding of the world. There was, of course, a time when modernity was Christianity, and the church fathers’ attacks on Epicurean atheism were intended to confirm their readers’ belief in the new dispensation. But I shall be dealing with texts that, on the surface at least, are confident that they are speaking from a position of established truth. Questions nevertheless remain. Why do accounts of a biblical creation and world order look to Lucretius’s poem on the nature of the universe? Is it the case that these texts safely contain the Lucretian message, or is there a surplus that threatens Christian orthodoxy? What degree of anxiety, or indeed illicit sense of liberation, is involved in imitating Lucretius’s gospel of rationalist materialism?

Keywords

Mother Earth Paradise Lost Church Father Poetical Work Human Word

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In general, see Frank E. Robbins, The Hexaemeral Literature: A Study of the Greek and Latin Commentaries on Genesis (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1912); J. Martin Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

On the interpretatio Ovidiana of Genesis, see Michael Roberts, “Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Latin Poets of Late Antiquity,” Arethusa 35 (2002): 403–15; indigesta moles applied to the Genesis story: A. B. Chambers, “Chaos in Paradise Lost,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

On Milton and the hexaemeral tradition, see Mary I. Corcoran, Milton’s Paradise with Reference to the Hexameral Background (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1945). References to Paradise Lost are from The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London and New York: Longman, 1968).Google Scholar

See Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, & Memory in Early Modern Britain & Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 379–83 on the physical appearance of earth as a direct consequence of human sinfulness, both the Fall and the Flood; a key text is Thomas Burnet’s Telluris theoria sacra (London, 1681); English version, The Sacred Theory of the Earth (London, 1684).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

See David Quint, “Fear of Falling: Icarus, Phaethon, and Lucretius in Paradise Lost,” Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2004): 875 for Milton’s revision here of Du Bartas. In general on Milton’s use of Du Bartas, see George C. Taylor, Milton’s Use of DuBartas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934).Google Scholar

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Philip Hardie

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Hardie P. (2016) Reflections of Lucretius in Late Antique and Early Modern Biblical and Scientific Poetry: Providence and the Sublime. In: Lezra J., Blake L. (eds) Lucretius and Modernity. The New Antiquity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York